In computer systems, boards (or printed circuit boards) such as motherboards and daughter cards, for example, are typically fabricated to hold computer components such as processors, chipsets, memory, etc. The boards also include features such as interconnects (for example, bus interconnects) that are used to electrically connect the various components. As bus data rates continue to scale (for example, in proportion to Moore's Law), the traditional materials used to fabricate boards such as motherboards and daughter cards begin to exhibit severe interconnect performance limitations. As frequencies increase, these limitations become one of the primary roadblocks to data rates above 8-10 Gb/s for server and desktop systems, for example.
Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) used in the fabrication of virtually all volume motherboards and daughter cards in the Personal Computer (PC) industry begin to introduce severe performance problems for high speed interconnect channels (for example, PCI-express). These performance limitations are generally dominated by two properties of the FR4 material used to fabricate these boards. These two properties include material loss and non-homogeneous dielectric issues. Therefore, a need has arisen for boards such as motherboards and/or daughter cards that do not include performance limitations for high speed interconnect channels.